There are a number of previous talks and other posts in various stages of “nearly finished” that I’ll try and sort in the next few weeks/months. They’ll be put in retrospective date order.

Just encountered my first 414 error: “Request-URI Too Long”. However I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to me sooner given how many Web 2.0(TM) websites use api calls to other apps via urls. (In other words, daisy-chaining ever longer referring urls into the next url visited.) For example, this is the url even the mighty Google baulked at when I wanted to post a comment on a blog by logging in to one of the main social media services linked to from within the blog page itself (thanks, TypePad).

https://www.blogger.com/openid-login.g?oidrp.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fthese-are-testing-times.blogspot.com%2F&oidrp.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.typepad.com%2Fsecure%2Fservices%2Fsignin%2Fopenid%3Farchetype.to%3D%252Fsitelogin%253Ffp%253Dc635b981cc45b06c0d2fd7cb720da2c5%2526view_uri%253Dhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fprofile.typepad.com%25252F%2526service%253Dopenid%2526uri%253Dhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fmarkhadfield.typepad.com%25252Fthat_gormandizer_man%25252F2009%25252F02%25252Fthetrainlinecom-fail.html%26openid-check%3D1%26archetype.via%3Dblogside%26tos_locale%3Den_US%26portal%3Dtypepad%26archetype.signin_openid%3D1%26oic.time%3D1294411291-e889c028716a401f72b9&oidrp.trust_root=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.typepad.com%2F&oidrp.assoc_handle=&oidrp.sreg.opt=timezone%2Cdob%2Cgender%2Clanguage%2Cpostcode%2Cfullname%2Ccountry&oidrp.sreg.req=nickname%2Cemail

What do you mean you can’t process this? It’s only 844 characters long!

[Edit: 10/01/11]
Further discussion here; 255 characters seems to be the gentlemen’s agreement.

Here’s an example of how not to do bulk emails.

Consumer Alerts send out marketing messages with the following standard text always included at the end of the message body, customised to the user:

This email has been sent to the following email address: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx

You are receiving this email because you have registered with creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk respects your privacy and only sends emails to registered members. Our emails are never sent unsolicited.

If you wish to unsubscribe from our future special offers click here.

http://consumer-alerts.co.uk/public/unsubscribe.jsp?gid=some_randomised_string

Please note that unsubscribe requests must be made from the email account used to register with creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx

To find out more about us and our privacy policy.

http://consumer-alerts.co.uk/re?l=some_other_randomised_string

The unsubscribe link does nothing. The page visited appears to ask a question:

Confirm Unsubscription

Are you sure you would like to unsubscribe from the Group(s):

Consumer Alerts (mailto:info@consumer-alerts.co.uk)

with the following email-address: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx?

We will send you a confirmation mail of this unsubscription. If you wish to re-subscribe, please reply to this email.

But there is still no mechanism by which you can actually confirm you wish to unsubscribe. Given the wording it looks like there should be a pair of [OK] and [Cancel] buttons but there aren’t. And sure enough, no confirmation email ever appears either.

OK, let’s try visitng their privacy policy page:

No such host.

Thinking laterally and going straight to http://consumer-alerts.co.uk gives no clues about how to unsubscribe either.

OK, a last-ditch attempt. This almost certainly won’t work (if they don’t care about letting people manage the emails they receive from them, how likely is it that they’ll reply to a manual request?):

Please remove xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx from all mailing lists you operate. I have tried to unsubscribe by following the links in the emails but they do not work.

After removing my email address, you should probably fix this problem.

Regards,
Paul

Update 22/09/10:

There is a submit button on the unsubscribe confirmation page, stuck out of sight at the extreme right of the page. I only noticed by looking at the source:

<div class=”submit-row”>

    <button name=”unsubscribe” type=”Submit”>- YES -</button>

</div>

Moral: If you do not provide an unsubscribe facility, or make it hard to find/use, then previously-solicited email that you no longer want very quickly becomes unsolicited. Thus, consumer-alerts.co.uk are spammers.

I have decided to sign up with Sky for their TV, broadband and phone package. This is mostly because I’m paying about as much for broadband and calls (mostly line rental actually) as Sky’s whole package. The Sky+ box really seals the deal though: no more trying to catch up with TV on BBC’s iPlayer (buffering……….) or having to muck about with DVD recorders, etc.

I wanted to enquire about what happened with line rental. The website seemed to handwave this detail, but you can’t just not explain an £11-£12/month charge or assume it’s a given. There appeared to be no contact number for them either, so I eventually got through to their sales dept via their SkyTalk (telephony services) number. Having said that their Dunfermline call centre handled the entire signup process very efficiently and courteously so full marks there.

I even have an installation appointment on a Sunday morning. That’s service.

So the automated signup/transfer process has now kicked in. This is where they fall down on detail.

Received a text this morning: “Your Sky Broadband will be activated on 13/01/2010.” Sorry, that’s impossible without me giving you the MAC key from my current broadband provider. There seems to be no mechanism by which I can send them this essential information. Maybe there’ll be a way via the member’s area on the website (MySky)? I got a confirmation email from them after signing up over the phone. Yep, the email has my username but no mention of a password! Maybe I gave them a password over the phone? Maybe it’s a randomised one you get when an account is created? No idea and they don’t hint at what’s going on.

Let’s try signing up without a password (you never know). Nope, can’t do that. OK, I’ll click the “Forgot password?” link even though I’ve not forgotten it; I’ve just never been told.

Email received with password which I can sign in with. Right, we’re moving again…

There’s no indication from the broadband setup progress page about what to do when migrating. Users this applies to who aren’t aware of this (assuming they’ve got this far) will get delayed because what they should be doing is contacting their current provider for their MAC key. A search through their help system does reveal the right page which does explain things clearly, but you have to know to look for it.

Moral: Join up your customer journeys so they are seamless. It’s no use having helpful staff on the phone if you then fall at the first few hurdles on the website.

Extra Moral: If you’re stopping your line, there’s no migration process (hence the redactions above). It magically works from the changeover point, which is a vast improvement on the old 7-10 day lead time for broadband activation.

How SQLite Is Tested is an extremely detailed account of how the team behind the world’s most popular embedded database verify its robustness.

It’s worth at least a skim read to see what they do. Some things jump out:

• Code required to comprehensively check other code is necessarily significantly larger and more complex than that which it’s testing. We already know that, but in SQLite’s case the testing code is 690 times larger than the source code.

• Regression testing must include specific checks for every bug ever reported, which are then used to show that the fixes hold for each release. Again, no surprises there, but the consequence is that this effort quickly snowballs into a lot of extra work and new releases take longer and longer to deliver.

• Static analysis has never proved useful (for them): not a single bug has been detected using this method. Even though this is mostly because their automated testing does such a thorough job it’s worth investigating how that might apply to your testing.

• They only achieved 100% branch coverage in August of this year. Clearly a high watermark for them but also a goal that takes a very long time to realise.

CNR

It could so easily have used cloning as a theme to arrive at “could not replicate” instead

I’m aware it’s been some time since I posted. However, in lieu of a “proper” blog post, I can tell you I’ve started reading Jerry Weinberg’s Perfect Software and will likely discuss it in a later post. I’ve heard good things about Jerry so it should be an informative read…

One of the side effects of testing is you develop a distrust of most software products, especially web sites. It’s a bit like the critic who can never really enjoy a show because he can never snap out of “review mode”. So it’s with some trepidation that I ever enter any punctuation marks into search fields, especially that most-abused of marks the apostrophe. Combine that with the fact that conscientious developers should always escape/strip quotation marks when passing user input to a query and you get this:

http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/code-store-search/domino’s

TheTrainLine.com deserves praise as it will let you check if two single fares are cheaper than the equivalent return fare when you search for a journey. They almost always are and this fantastic feature saves you a packet for just about every return trip you make. (Such are the vagaries of the ATOC/National Rail fares system, but there we are.)

Anyway I wanted to remind myself what time my train goes tonight, so checked the booking/journey confirmation email. However it has a bit of a flaw in presenting a critical piece of information (which I have highlighted):

Dear MR PAUL BERRY,

With your journey approaching we wanted to remind you of your travel details.

Collection Reference: 352CHH7W

Be Sure to bring this reference with you along with the payment card used to make the booking as both will be required to collect your ticket from the Self Service Ticket Machine.

From: SHEFFIELD

To: LONDON ST PANCRAS INTL

Date: 16/01/2009

Departure time: 0.76875

All your journey details are available in the my account section of our website.

If you need help with your booking, please visit our help section or call us on 0871 244 1545*

We hope you have a safe and enjoyable journey,

thetrainline team

*Please note that calls to this number cost 10p per minute plus network extras

Now this looks like a classic “time stored as decimal” formatting issue, as you sometimes see on raw spreadsheet data. The mystery is solved if you consider the time as a fraction of a day. 24 hrs * 0.76875 = 18.45 hrs or 18:27 in sexagesimal. Double-checking the times (since I’d already lost trust in the accuracy of the data) on National Rail Enquiries does indeed show a train departing Sheffield for London at 18:27 tonight.

I’m just thinking a bit further here of the person who goes through the trouble of doing the maths to work out the time but doesn’t do the final step so they get 18.45, which looks reasonable enough, and turn up for their quarter-to-seven train having missed it by 15 or so minutes! (Of course if the decimal hours come out at, say, 18.67 then that’s clearly not a time and in itself would be a prompt to complete the conversion but the above scenario still stands.)

What was Steve Krug‘s mantra again?

I wonder how many phone calls they get because of this? Could be a nice little earner! 😉

Sometimes you just grind to a halt when testing: you’ve exhausted the test plan, tried most reasonable combinations of inputs, even thought of and exploited the most devious set of circumstances to trip up the application, all that stuff. Now your eyes are starting to glaze over. It happens, especially if there are no opportunities to pair test or hand over to a colleague.

Well the following technique worked for me and I didn’t even know that it was anything special or realise it would yield a fresh batch of bugs. So here’s what you do…

List stuff!

Yep, look at the whole screen and list things in the order they appear. I mean actually type the headings, titles, etc, into a spreadsheet or whatever your favourite note-taking method is. Then compare these views with the functional and technical specs, if available. Your mileage may vary, but you might find some subtle bugs.

It’s really that simple. And it can work: after a while you become blind to the design, layout and behaviour of the software under test. Force yourself to read everything. You may feel you’re going over things you’ve already seen a million times but truth is you may never have looked at them that closely to begin with.

As an example, I was testing an application which stored the names, addresses, etc of a list of clients the customer dealt with regularly. The list was rendered as a datasheet: column headings across the top, draggable, clickable to sort up/down. Nothing special at all. Then I noticed one of the columns was called “Country”. Did the customer have any international clients? Was there a field on the input form to specify a country? In any case, were these even requirements? No to all three. So there was a completely useless column sat there (copy-and-paste code?) and neither I nor anyone else had noticed after testing for over a month. There’s the rub: after seeing the same old screens day in day out I had become as good as blind to them, until I adopted a fresh way of looking at things…